Vincent Cronin

Vincent Cronin, son of the Scottish novelist, A J Cronin is a doyen of English letters. His book The Last Migration, which won the Heinemann Award, was based on his own journey with the Gashgai of southern Iran. He widened his reputation with his outstanding biographies of Christianity's first missionaries to India (A Pearl to India: the Life of Roberto de Nobili) and to China (The Wise Man from the West: Matteo Ricci and his Mission to China), and a range of later biographies - of Napoleon, Catherine the Great, Louis (XVI) and Antoinette, and his masterly Four Women in Search of an Ideal (Car